SlimComputer has been in beta testing since its unveiling at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas in July, and it's gotten good reviews. I've been using the beta version on my 2-year-old HP Mini netbook, and it has noticeably improved my machine's performance.

The program runs in the Internet cloud continually gathering feedback from all of its users to assess unnecessary programs that typically run in the background and bog down your PC. It removes such programs but stores copies on its servers in case you choose to later re-install one of them.

It also looks for unnecessary applications that come preloaded on new PCs, such as trial offers, promotional software, advertising links, unwanted tool bars, start-up items and shortcuts. You'd be surprise to see a list of how much of this stuff is probably running on your PC right now, slowing down performance.

And since the utility runs on SlimWare's servers, there is no big client program taking up space on your hard drive or sucking up RAM. You can actually load the User Interface dashboard onto a USB thumb drive and use the thumb drive to transfer copies of the SlimComputer dashboard to other machines.

"New computers come preloaded with dozens of unnecessary programs that drain resources and slow down a machine," said Chris Cope, CEO of SlimWare Utilities. "By giving consumers the ability to remove software they didn't ask for and don't want, we're letting people customize their online experience and have the best, most optimized new computer."

SlimWare hopes to eventually sell a souped-up version of the utility to businesses.